Putinism emphasized its continuity with Soviet-style socialism, but it could not combine its libertarian policies with any version of left ideology. Perceptive scholars saw that Putinism was moving towards fascism, but social disparities prevented its development into a mass movement.22 If Putinism had an ideology it was imperialism in its special form of revanchism. Although nationalist at its core, Putinism was also an international movement; from its financial and political base in Russia, it spread around the world. Before the war, Putin and his people maintained a balance between their ultra-conservative message and their revisionist stance, which was digestible only for their Russian supporters. The war demonstrated the fragility of this alliance. Post-Soviet revanchism meant nothing to Putin's international allies. Even the US Republican Party, a loyal partner of Moscow for decades, condemned the invasion in Ukraine.
Economically, Putinism focused on Russia's energy exports. The Kremlin was the main beneficiary of supply chains that started in the Siberian marshes and ended in European and Asian fuel tanks, boilers and air-conditioners. In the era of climate crisis and inequality concerns, the Kremlin wished to conceal both its dependency on fossil trade and the damage it was doing to the planet. The Russian government produced three responses to the growing awareness of climate change: denial, deception and military preparations.
Denial
Three decades of boom and bust in post-Soviet Russia coincided with its long and tortured cognizance of the climate crisis. The Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, giving life to fifteen independent states, Russia and Ukraine among them. In 1992, the United Nations adopted its Convention on Climate Change, which acknowledged "dangerous human interference with the climate system." That year, Putin was working in St. Petersburg, where he controlled foreign trade and got his first taste of corruption. Adopted in 1997, the Kyoto Protocol created the first international mechanism for controlling emissions. In 1998, miners' strikes and a financial crisis brought Russia to default; in the midst of this turmoil, Putin was appointed head of the Federal Security Service, his powerbase for decades to come. In 2000, Paul Crutzen, the Nobel Prize-winning chemist, coined the concept of the Anthropocene, and Putin became Russia's president. In 2004, Rex Tillerson, an engineer from Texas who specialized in Russian oil, became the head of ExxonMobil. That same year, the Orange Revolution started in Kyiv. In 2005, ExxonMobil and the Koch brothers launched a massive campaign of climate denial in the American media. In 2008, Putin swapped roles with his adjutant Dmitry Medvedev, who formulated a vague program of modernization. In 2012, Putin returned to the Kremlin amid protests in Moscow. Between 2009 and 2011, "Climategate" attempted to discredit the scientific research on climate change. In 2014, the Revolution of Dignity in Kyiv paved the way for the European development of Ukraine. That year, Putin occupied and annexed Crimea. In 2015, the Paris Climate Agreement was struck. Supported by Putin, Donald Trump became President of the United States in 2016 and appointed Rex Tillerson as his Secretary of State. The US withdrew from the Paris Treaty in 2017. The global Covid- 19 pandemic began in China in December 2019, with Russia suffering the highest excess mortality worldwide. In 2020, the EU adopted the European Green Deal, an ambitious program for halving its emissions. In 2022, Russia ramped up its war against Ukraine.
The burning of fossil fuels created the C02 emissions that led to climate crisis. The truth was as simple as that, but there were vested interests in denying it. Russia was a major exporter of oil, gas and coal. Climate awareness threatened its existential interests, as Putin's experts well understood. A great source for studying Russia's climate denialism are the writings of Andrei Illarionov, economic advisor to President Putin from 2000 to 2005, and later a senior fellow at the Cato Institute,
Washington DC. Having written volumes of analytics that denied the manmade character of climate change, Illarionov stated in 2004 that the Kyoto Protocol was something like an "international Gosplan" (referring to the USSR's State Planning Committee), only much worse. In fact, he said, "the Kyoto Protocol is akin to the Gulag and Auschwitz." What's the connection? - Kyoto was "a treaty of death... since its main goal is to stifle economic growth and economic activity in the countries that will accept the obligations of this protocol."23 Illarionov's position was close to that of many in the Russian elite.
In 2009, the unknown hackers who initiated Climategate stole and published thousands of private emails in the hope of demonstrating that climate change was a scientific conspiracy. Two years later, a Russian server published yet another trove of 5,000 climate-related emails. These cyberattacks on climate science prefigured the larger operations that defined the politics of the following decade. Illarionov was later an avid supporter of Donald Trump. In 2021, he was fired from the Cato Institute because of his allegations that the attack on the US Capitol was a "trap" set by police. In multiple interviews, he denied Russia's military preparations right up until the invasion of Ukraine. The Cato Institute, a libertarian thinktank financed by the Koch brothers, was an intellectual center of the global climate- denial movement. The father of these brothers, Fred Koch, was also the father of the Soviet oil-refining industry. Having invented new ways of cracking oil, Koch built fifteen refineries in the Soviet Union between 1929 and 1932. Before his eyes, his friends and associates were arrested and murdered during the Soviet terror.24 Disenchanted like many other fellow-travelers, Koch turned into an avid enemy of the international left; I call it the Ayn Rand syndrome.25 Eventually, Koch returned his business to the US, though he also helped to build refineries for Nazi Germany. His heirs, Charles and David Koch, the owners of the biggest petrochemical company in the US, ambivalently supported Trump's candidacy in 2016. But their real interest was the fusion of liber tarianism and climate denialism that was so characteristic of Putinism.
For the global efforts at climate action, Russia's denialism was a strategic obstacle. Euro-Atlantic leaders imagined decarbonization as a process of cooperation and shared sacrifice. Many of them also had doubts and fears regarding decarbonization. But only the beneficiaries of the oil and gas trade knew precisely how much they would lose if this trade were to cease. The truth was that sellers of carbon would suffer more than its buyers. For various reasons, state actors and climate activists underestimated this structural asymmetry. With some naivety, they thought that climate awareness would be equal at all nodes of the fossil trade. But Russia's absence from the climate deal turned the common cause into a zero-sum game.
Deception
In the 2010s, the climate crisis was developing rapidly. Heat waves, extreme weather events, fires and famines proved its existence to voters across the world. In Europe and other continents, democratic governments felt obliged to show their awareness of the crisis but largely failed to coordinate their actions. Drilling and petrochemical corporations spent billions on lobbying to block any meaningful decarbonization policies.